Blizzard announced some interesting changes to the vote kick system of WoW's Dungeon Finder: Players who rarely abandon groups or try to vote kick others will have the cooldown on the vote kick function removed, while it remains in place for people who initiate vote kicks often or desert often.

I think that this is a good idea. Patience is a virtue, and if you are a generally patient person and don't immediately leave a group because the random dungeon you entered isn't your favorite, or try to vote kick the tank because he doesn't wear full ICC gear, you probably have a good reason when one day you really want to use that vote kick.
- posted by Tobold Stoutfoot @ 7:00 AM Permanent Link
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well... there is the other side. This is in a way a kind of social engineering by the developers, forcing the players who frequently desert the group - or vote kick - to change their ways. In a way I can see the bad in this, too... Say we have a vocal dps and silent tank. Both do their job the way they do, tank is tanking steadily but not as fast as the dps would like to. Come trouble, and the dps will go wild.Knowing about this cooldown issue, he takes another route instead: start picking on everyone in the group. He that, you this and so on.

In the end, even the mellow tank who has done nothing wrong to anyone is FORCED to cast a vote.

The anti-social behaviour doesn't go away. It becomes more prominent. The cooldown for abandoning a group or initiating a kick vote should be longer, a kind of penalty rathen than annoyance instead.

Since the cooldown is decreased in general (removed for some, stay for others, not increased to any). It will obviously increase kicks.

Strike that, it will change the now silent kick into a public humiliation where the "cooldown" people spams chat "someone without cooldown pls initiate kick on XXX", he is doing 1K. Of course XXX will talk back and drama comes until the silent guy finally kicks someone. Not surely XXX but a kick will happen.

Be reasonable, but *do* kick those who aren't pulling their weight. Don't expect 6k dps, but 1k is unacceptable, as is a tank or a healer who significantly slows down or jeopardizes the run for whatever reason.

@Tomaez - I disagree that people need to "pull their weight" - they need to pull what a heroic was designed to do. The patchwerk "gate" was 1500DPS IIRC and heroics were less than that. People can gearcheck and "post achievements" for their ICC pugs, put part of heroics is to give everyone, including fresh 80s gear 4 or 5 levels higher than the gear the instances were designed for. You are also free to get your own group. But if you venture onto the public transit of LFD, you are going to find some to the public.

Say someone with 187-200 gear is doing 1500k and someone with 264 gear is doing 3k. Who do you kick? the guy who is doing the worse or the guy performing worse?

Also remember that as you get more gear, the gear of the people they group you with tends to go down.

This reminds me of what Valve does with Left 4 Dead's matchmaking system: If you leave/get kicked out of games quickly, you get matched with similar people. People who stick for the whole campaign get matched with people who do the same. In essence, it's a two-way slippery slope: Good players get even better games, and bad/annoying/griefing players get worse games.

I hate this change, because when it's really late at night/early in the morning, I like to queue up as a tank while in DPS gear - and then either wipe the group, complain that the healer isn't doing a good enough job, or go sit in Dalaran. The other players are forced to either leave group, wait 15 minutes to kick me, or - if a single person leaves, I can queue back up for the current dungeon as a DPS.

By doing this, the system puts our tankless group at top priority to get a tank, that way I don't have to wait in queue 12 minutes to get a group as DPS. However, with the new system, I will just be kicked instantly when I'm not doing my job as tank. Therefor, I veto this change.

I like the change overall, but I'll have to adjust. Right now I almost always drop group after a wipe, just because half of the group always drops as well and it's almost never worth it to wait around for replacements.

I personally don't kick people for low dps in my randoms, but jerks (either vocally, or by doing something stupid like pulling for the tank as a DPS), can expect a swift kick. I wonder if mine will be on a cooldown? I'll be quite angry if it is! I could definately see me using my kicks more than the average joe (most people seem willing to put up with anything to just finish the damn run).

@Hagu, @Drilski - I'm not saying that someone should be excluded just becuase their gear is "weak" (by 3.3.3 standards - like you correctly pointed out, heroics don't require any gear).

However, with party buffs and Luck of the Draw, even a freshly dinged level 80 in quest greens is capable of dealing 1.5k without breaking a sweat. If you actually focus you'll do 2k+ even in trash gear.

Someone at 1k dps is either absolutely terrible or slacking big time, at which point I don't think the other players should carry them. Expend 25 energy.

As for your question, I don't kick either of them (though I believe even the 187-200 guy could perform better).

I hate the change where they started handing out frost badges for doing randoms when players are 4 tiers overgeared for them.

Protip: Blizzard knows that players in T8 or higher are far over geared for heroics and that once they surpass the line, there would be no reason to go back which leaves all the other players with a smaller pool to choose from.

The babysitting terrible players aspect is the intention of the frost badges. You are not getting frost badges for running the heroic. You are getting the frost badges as compensation for babysitting terrible players. The thing you hate about heroics is in fact the very design of the random dungeon system.

Also note that this isn't a cold logical approach. A cold logical approach (for dps) would be to simply estimate the dps of the average LFD user (more formally, the expected value of the dps a new player brings into the group), and kick anyone below that number in an effort to improve your group, speeding up the run.

One of the things I hate the most in LFD is when people say "sorry gtg emergency" and we're perfectly okay with them leaving, but then instead of leaving the group, they just log off.

They don't lose points for abandoning a group, but often enough this happens immediately after we kill a boss, the person who left didn't roll on the loot and we have to wait 5 minutes for the loot timer to expire before we can kick them -- thus losing points ourselves for kicking them.

I can see more people logging off if they want to leave, so that they don't lose their vote-kicking privilege. They'd get a 30-minute debuff if they leave, but they'll be removed from the group in a fraction of the time by forcing someone else to kick them.

That being said, I still think this is a fantastic change (my initial thought when I read it on MMOChampion was "BRILLIANT!"), and if people do start logging off mid-run, maybe Blizzard will finally do something about it.

I'm against this change, I think it ruins the ability to remove those people that make the game less fun.

Why should I have to put up with someone's mouth and have them get a reward for being a jerk and/or completely underperforming? doing <1k dps at 80 is just piss-poor, even in quest greens. If you don't know how to play your class at 80, don't step into group content.

The biggest problem I see with this (and with the original implementation of vote kick with a cooldown) is that Blizzard forces us to put up with someone's retardation for a maximum of 15 minutes - some runs are over before this time.

People who instigate a vote kick to a green geared player just for showing up in quest greens should have the tables turned, and be vote kicked themselves for being retarded.

I'm not the "Blizz is dumbing it all down" guy on most any change, but on this one they really are. Give people the ability to kick without cooldown, and make people choose correctly whether to kick someone or not. 3/5 people should be smart enough to vote against a kick for a low-geared person that's trying, but able to remove mouthy retards who will afk on the run as soon as mom needs them to take out the garbage.

I could care less about the 2 daily frost badges, which is why I personally don't tend to run heroics anywhere near a daily basis. What I do care about is enjoying the time I spend when I do decide to enter a dungeon.

"Patience" is not putting up with fucking retards, in real life you will be kicked out of public establishments for acting the way these people do.

Don't freaking queue for a random if your WoW-hating Mom is due home. Don't queue if you just put a pot of water on to boil. Don't queue if there are cookies in the oven or you are the only parent home with your 3 year old.

And don't be an asshat in the instance.

Being an asshat includes phrenetically typing gogogogogo or having a tizzy if your precious random takes 10 minutes longer because you got a new and learning player.

At lower level dungeons, I guess this isn’t much of an issue I’ve only initialled a kick out once (huntard who ‘needed’ on everything, then went AFK), and one ever had a vote to kick once as well, and I’ve done nothing but run instances for the past 20 levels.

I'd be fine with this change if they also increased penalties for players who are regularly kicked out. It seems unbalanced to penalize the people using the options but not the ones who they were designed for.